After months of Donald Trump recycling Fox News lines equating those protesting racial injustice to domestic terrorists, the president’s acting Department of Homeland Security secretary appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show on Monday to tease what sounds like the department’s potential mass-arrest plan. Carlson pressed DHS chief Chad Wolf on why “the leaders of antifa and BLM” have not yet been rounded up, suggesting that they should be “arrested and charged with conspiracy under, say, RICO like the heads of Mafia families were.”
“Well, this is something that I have talked to [Attorney General William Barr] personally about. I know that they are working on it,” said Wolf, adding that officials have made “about 300 arrests across this country regarding civil unrest,” including about 75 who have been charged in Portland alone. (Several of those arrests occurred when federal officers barreled protesters into unmarked vans.) “The Department of Justice is also targeting and investigating the head of these organizations, the individuals that are paying for these individuals to move across the country,” he said.
https://twitter.com/justinbaragona/status/1300592193338585093
It’s unclear exactly who the DOJ views as the leaders of nebulous political movements like antifa and Black Lives Matter, as the past few months of nationwide protests sparked by police shootings of Black Americans are largely grassroots, often spontaneous demonstrations organized at local levels. But Wolf described BLM as a hierarchical movement and suggested that the group uses a methodical and far-reaching process of organizing. “We know [protesters] are moving around,” he said. “We have seen them in D.C., in Sacramento, and elsewhere. They are organized.… I know that the Department of Justice is also looking at that as well.” He also noted that out of the “175 arrests in Kenosha, almost 100 of them were from out of state.”
There was no mention of Kyle Rittenhouse, the white Trump supporter who crossed state lines to show up armed at a Kenosha, Wisconsin, protest last week and who has been charged with murdering two protesters with a semiautomatic rifle. (He has not yet entered a plea.) When Carlson has discussed Rittenhouse, a 17-year-old wannabe cop who belonged to a public-safety cadet program, the host has used sympathetic terms. “How shocked are we that 17-year-olds with rifles decided they had to maintain order when no one else would?” he said last week. (Ironically, Carlson opened the Wolf segment with a chyron that read “Dems Try to Distance Themselves From Violence,” implying that Joe Biden is the candidate tied to the worst offenders.) While Carlson views Rittenhouse’s alleged killings as an understandable reaction, he has, at various points, described protesters as “thugs” hellbent on “[destroying] our cities and our history,” pursuing an “ancient battle” against “normal people.”
The theory that protesters are strategically infiltrating cities across the country has grown legs in Republican circles. On Tuesday, the president cited an alleged “firsthand account” from an unnamed source to posit that “anarchists” are carrying out some kind of traveling protest tour. “A person was on a plane, said that there were about six people like that person, more or less, and what happened is the entire plane filled up with the looters, the anarchists, rioters, people that obviously were looking for trouble,” Trump told reporters at Joint Base Andrews prior to his flight to Kenosha, where he will give a “law and order” speech tonight. His claim about a flight “completely loaded with thugs,” who he said were planning to wreak havoc on last week’s Republican National Convention, echoes a viral but soundly debunked Facebook post from June, per NBC News. And last week, Senator Rand Paul told Fox News that the protesters who heckled him outside the White House after the RNC are “interstate criminal traffic being paid.”
More Great Stories From Vanity Fair
— An Oral History of the Protest Movement’s First Days
— How America’s Brotherhood of Police Officers Stifles Reform
— Fox News Staffers Feel Trapped in the Trump Cult
— The Tale of How a Saudi Prince Disappeared
— Ta-Nehisi Coates Guest-Edits THE GREAT FIRE, a Special Issue
— New Postal Service Plans Sets Off Election Alarms
— Stephen Miller and His Wife, Katie, Found Love in a Hateful Place
— From the Archive: Rupert Murdoch’s New Life
— Not a subscriber? Join Vanity Fair to receive the September issue, plus full digital access, now.